orudge wrote:JamieLei wrote:Eeek - Very minute trace amounts of radiation from Fukushima found in Britain and the rest of Europe. Scary.
Scary? Not really. You yourself said "very minute trace amounts". The media just likes to cause a panic... I'm probably exposed to more radiation by virtue of living near, and regularly visiting, Aberdeen!
Actually you would be exposed to more radiation just by "living".
The radiation that occurs naturally inside your own body, purely from potassium-40, is 4000 Becquerel (Bq).
What they measured above Glasgow is 300 micro-Bq, or 0.0003 Bq. Above Oxford, it was 0.000011Bq.
So in Glasgow, thats 13million times more radiation from within your own body than what the wind brought over from Japan. In Oxford, its 300million. Purely compared to what goes on naturally inside your body! From 1 element!
Also, speaking of backgroun radiation in the UK
Wikipedia wrote:
Some of these areas, including Cornwall and Aberdeenshire in the United Kingdom have high enough natural radiation levels that nuclear licensed sites cannot be built there — the sites would already exceed legal radiation limits before they opened, and the natural topsoil and rock would all have to be disposed of as low-level nuclear waste.
Source:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~scdiroff/ld ... nBody.html
http://www.hpa.org.uk/NewsCentre/Nation ... Fukushima/
And have another quote about the 'dangers' of nuclear power (from wikipedia, cited):
Wikipedia wrote:Radioactive materials previously buried underground in coal deposits are released as fly ash or, if fly ash is captured, may be incorporated into concrete manufactured with fly ash. Radioactive materials are also released in gaseous emissions. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation estimates that per gigawatt-year (GWea) of electrical energy produced by coal, using the current mix of technology throughout the world, the population impact is approximately 0.8 lethal cancers per plant-year distributed over the affected population. With 400 GW of coal-fired power plants in the world, this amounts to some 320 deaths per year.
320 deaths per year caused by radiation released by burning coal...